The box: Building block of civilization
December 2022
One thing I’ve noticed with the fading of the Covid crisis is the drastic decline in little boxes shuffling in and out of my life.
There was a time, not too many months ago, when a UPS, Fed-Ex or Postal Service truck briefly parked in front of our house nearly every day, sometimes twice or three times a day. A driver would come hustling up to the front porch, find a bare spot among the ash buckets and piles of kindling and stove wood, drop a brown carton of as-yet undetermined purpose and then hurry back to his or her vehicle, mission accomplished.
Most of the packages, I want to make clear, were not destined for me. The other person who lives here, and the dog she feeds and loves, were the recipients and/or beneficiaries of nearly all the various packages.
The containers left for me weren’t even boxes, most of the time. They were usually padded envelopes filled with paper, plastic or aluminum packets of seeds, for everything from kale to zucchini. The stuff for me was going to be sprinkled in the ground in order to reap a plethora of vegetative riches a few months later on the wall calendar.
But I should hasten to add that I didn’t mind the boxes. I’ve always been an aficionado of cardboard containers, amazed and impressed by the designers who could take a flat sheet of corrugated paper, put a few strategically placed creases and cuts in them, and -- voila! –fold them into sturdy cubes that could deliver anything from a pair of eyeglasses to a lawn chair.
Who taught people how to do that? Did they go to college to learn the skill? Is there a University of Container Construction out there somewhere, maybe in Kansas or Alabama or Idaho, that I never heard of?
Is there a two-year program that covers basic square and rectangular shapes, a four-year course of study that includes circular and triangular works, and maybe a Ph.d program that covers all the little mini-boxes inside the big boxes that keep the contents from sliding around and breaking?
I’m sure the successful completion of a course in solid geometry would be required, and probably other math skills far beyond my own knowledge of basic arithmetic.
And where did all this start? According to what I’ve been able to learn noodling around on the Internet, the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and early intellectuals of India were the first peoples to plot out the basic principles of geometry. It was the Greeks, then, who took the musings to a new level of systematic analysis and description.
Big name thinkers like Thales, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid figured out all sorts of things, like the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and the idea that two parallel lines can go on forever without bumping into each other.
But who learned how to take those lines and fold them a few times so that the beginnings meet the ends, and you have a square or a rectangle? And who came up with the astounding discovery that you could arrange four sets of those constructions to make a cube – a box!
Maybe it was somebody named U.P.Silanti, Fedexalis or Postalopilous.
Wikipedia says the first commercial paperboard box came centuries later, and was probably the work of an English company called M. Treverton & Son, in 1817. The French came along about 20 years later and developed a box to ship the Bombyx mori moth and its eggs to silk manufacturers. Then a couple of American brothers in Battle Creek, Michigan started distributing their corn flakes in cardboard cartons and – boom! -- it was off to the races.
Cardboard boxes came tumbling out of factories across the globe, destined for other factories to fill and send along to porches in thousands of communities in hundreds of nations.
Millions of people around the world were overjoyed, and happily stowed their burlap bags and leather pouches in the attic or out in the shed. The only folks were troubled were the ones who made clay pots or reed baskets or grew big gourds, upset that they were the first artisans anointed as the first victims of technological innovation.
There’s obviously a whole lot more to this story, a tale that deserves a telling because modern civilization wouldn’t be what it is today if everything had to be transported in those pots, baskets bags. It’s a subject ripe for a large library of doctoral dissertations. But not everybody is as interested in this as I am – some folks are more fascinated by breakthroughs like Velcro, rubber bands and paper clips, for example, not to mention double-sided Scotch tape and shocking pink duct tape.
If I had the time, I’d do the history myself. I’d do it to salute all those tinkerers who labored so hard in their garages and basements over the past 200 years or so to put those boxes on my front porch, even if they didn’t contain something for me. I truly admire the inventors and the examples of their work, and I’ve collected and saved many, many of the containers even though they weren’t addressed to me. Who could throw away such fine examples of human ingenuity?
Someone else, alas, is going to have to tell the Story of the Box. I’m too busy trying to find stuff to fill these marvels of ingenuity. Does anybody out there need some for themselves? Just let me know.